never seen him with anyone else before or heard any rumors about him with other women.
“Doing shots alone at the bar will only make you look bad. Not him.” I wanted her to see it from a different viewpoint. “They’ll say that he’s flirting with other women because you’re a drunk. No one knows the side of him that we do. They don’t see it.”
She swallowed and sucked in her cheeks. “You’re right. I always forget that they don’t know.”
“Don’t let him win,” I said, taking her arm in mine and leading her to the dance floor.
“You’re the only person who makes this all bearable,” she said as we danced, and I felt the same way.
Without her here, I’d have left the second we showed up, consequences be damned.
*
Christmas morning held about as much charm as any other day. I dreaded getting up and pulling myself out of bed. There wasn’t a pile of presents waiting underneath the tree anymore. Hell, half the time, there wasn’t even a tree at all. But ever since I’d moved out of the house, DD said that paying for me to go waste my time at Fullton State was present enough, so what else could I possibly need?
He was right though. I didn’t want or need shit from him.
My only saving grace was the money that got automatically deposited into my bank account each month. My mom’s parents had set up some sort of trust for me before they died, and I’d been getting money since I was fifteen years old. I had to reach out to a financial advisor if I ever wanted to access any of it, so I tried not to touch it, knowing that at some point in the future, I was going to need it, and it was going to save me. For now, as long as I played by DD’s rules, he still let me use the credit card in my name. But I knew that one bad move by me, and that would get cut off faster than I could blink an eye.
A swift knock on my door let me know that my mom was up.
“Breakfast,” she said.
I told her, “Okay,” as I fired off a quick text to my girl, wishing her a merry Christmas. When there was no immediate response, I left my phone on my nightstand and padded downstairs.
The least I could do was not leave my mom alone with DD while I was here. The smell of food slammed into my senses before I hit the last step.
Mom’s cooking?
“That smells incredible,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, noticing my mom at the stove, making pancakes and frying up eggs.
DD sat at the table, a newspaper covering his entire face, as if waiting to be served. As I pulled out the chair to sit across from him, he folded the paper and put it down, his eyes narrowing in on me.
“Did you have a nice time at the holiday party?” he asked.
It was the first time we’d sat down together since the big soiree.
I shrugged my shoulders, sick of lying just to appease him. “It was whatever,” I said, knowing it might piss him off.
“It was whatever?” he mimicked. “Stop acting like a child, Mackenzie.”
“What?” I argued. “It was boring. It’s always boring.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it because there’s a lot more where that came from once you join the firm.”
I cleared my throat and cast a concerned look toward my mom, who gave me a small shake of her head, warning me not to push his buttons.
“Dad, look,” I started.
He pressed his elbows onto the table. If he were wearing a tie, he would have started messing with it. The sign that I was frustrating him.
“Look at what? What a gift I’ve given you? What a screwup you are? What an ungrateful, unworthy son you are? Tell me, Mackenzie, what exactly am I looking at?” The words flew out of his mouth without any effort. He didn’t have to stop and think about what names to call me or what to say. They lived right there, on the tip of his tongue, just waiting to come out and decimate me.
Normally, the blunt force of his words would have done their job. Not today.
“Richard”—my mom sounded so wounded—“it’s Christmas.”
“So?” He slammed his hands on top of the table with so much force that his glass started to wobble. I silently wished it would fall. “Christmas means what? That we pretend